Betrayed - GrandmasterJ
We go back to Black Mesa to fill the shoes of a naive scientist who thinks the military is here to save everybody. We go back to Lambda core to get our revenge for some reason.
Author:Zorbos
Date of release: 2007
Maps in package: 1
Map review of Betrayed
(originally posted on SCMapDB)
by GrandmasterJ | February 2, 2023 | 5242 characters
In this map we go back to Lambda Core. This is pretty much what the map description says and what the level is. Lambda Core already exists so I am not sure why we are redoing it, this map is certainly not better than it.
Players start off by infiltrating the facility from the outside, down an elevator and into a series of hallways. There are a lot of enemies and they usually have really high health, occasionally there is a glowing monster with really really high health. After about three different kinds of hallways we come to a room with forcefields blocking doors. This map is an abandoned beta so only two of the three forcefields have anything behind them. Through the right door is another three hallways to our new spawn which is incredibly helpful as the enemies are beefy and the original spawn is on the other side of an elevator and six kinds of hallway. Here we fall down an elevator shaft to a very short hallway and a room filled with turrets. Finally, the next area is the Lambda Core.
This whole area is lifted right from Half-Life, players enter a teleporter to get on spinning platforms and then jump into teleporters in the core. The teleporters don't send you to the usual places like in Half-Life, these all go somewhere different. My teammate completed a bunch of them without me while I dicked around in the one room that needed two players to complete. There are four buttons, the first one locks the camera onto a door in the next room and opens the door. The next three buttons all open doors but don't lock the camera. My teammate managed to get into the first door despite the camera being locked. I tried it too, it was pretty fun. The end to this section is a heavy weapons grunt with 4000 health and a teleporter, as I was tossing a banana grenade while locked in the room with him my corpse was flung across the room and onto a pickup with triggered the camera locked on the bottom of the Lambda Core and a computer was being uncaged. One of the other teleporters put us at the bottom where we used the computer (not attacked it) which destroyed it, lowering the forcefield.
At this point my teammate and I were kind of lost, we kept looking for where the forcefield went down, we had to backtrack from new spawn. Behind this forcefield is a hallway of pain, a crowd of bodyguards and one with a minigun, a Kingpin, and Tor, all with very high health. Once Tor is killed the game ends.
Right from the beginning there was a severe lack of ammo. The map description states best for 3-8 players and with the swarms of enemies and the high health they had sometimes that seems right. But my teammate and I were constantly rushing in to take supplies for ourselves, leaving the other with nothing. Before the first spawn point we even had to roam the level to collect weapons and ammo. The second spawn area never does get grenades or snarks. The map did have some ammo backpacks around but once again, not enough for 3-8 people.
Enemies are poured on thick with some super variants sprinkled throughout. There are also some trollish sections, like early on there was a room with three chumtoads directly under the window where players are forced to climb through. They aren't easy to spot until you are right on top of them and then they are releasing their deadly gas. Another area had players walking in a crawlspace above a room only for snarks to start spawning in with no discernable end. Eventually they did stop but it took a long time. After the snarks stop, players get to pick up their own snarks. These will immediately come in handy and overall work really great with the map. Too bad they only appear here and never at a spawn point.
The combat is very much old school Sven, lots of enemies with high health dumped on players. The level design mostly hallway supported by architecture and puzzle taken directly from Half-Life. I am not really a fan of snarks being dumped in the way of progression and making players wait for an arbitrary amount of time. Also not a fan of the chumtoads but we could blow them up easily. I wish there was more ammo and less elevators. I don't like the level composition and how it's six hallways and a knock off lambda core puzzle. The new spawn comes in a bit too late (or get rid of that elevator ride) and undersupplied. I didn't mention how the map looked because it looked bland. It's all standard Black Mesa textures used to create Black Mesa. Some things were blockier than I think they should have been, like a big chunk of cabling in the snark crawlspace.
Pros:
- Updating spawn point is necessary and appreciated
- the map gave me snarks and it was fun to use them
- the map shows players what they triggered via cutscenes and messages
Cons:
- The level is a bland retread of a level in Half-Life, they already made Lambda Core, go play that one
- the snarks getting dumped on players only serves to bring the map to a halt
- spawn points were far between and lacked certain weapons
- not enough ammo and supplies in general
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